Chapter Title: Introduction: Animal Acts for Changing Times, 2.

0: A Field Guide to
Interspecies Performance
Chapter Author(s): Una Chaudhuri

Book Title: Animal Acts

Book Subtitle: Performing Species Today
Book Editor(s): Una Chaudhuri and Holly Hughes
Published by: University of Michigan Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvnjbfn0.3

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 by Una Chaudhuri

Introduction: Animal Acts for Changing Times,

2.0: A Field Guide to Interspecies Performance

Things are moving fast in the human-­animal world. So much so that an

upgrade seems warranted on my earlier take on it, or rather my take on
that part of it that intersects with the world of performance, theatre, and
performance studies. Version 1.0 of this bulletin appeared in American The-
atre magazine a few years ago,1 and the double meaning lurking in its title
has proved to be prophetic. The interspecies performances that are going
on in our changing times, both onstage and off, are also good for producing
change, not only in the ways we live with animals and the ways we think
about them but also by transforming our values more broadly, resetting our
priorities, rebooting our sense of what it might mean to be human: “animal
acts,” in short, are a powerful way to change the world.
In the past few years, a spate of conferences, scholarly monographs, criti-
cal anthologies, book series, college courses, new journals, and special issues
of journals have variously registered “the animal turn” in the humanities
and social sciences.2 This academic burgeoning reflects a rapidly dawning
“animal consciousness” in the culture at large, recorded in countless re-
cent works of fiction, art, film, and popular culture. The impetus for this
heightened attention to animals (or, as we’ve now learned to say: to the other
animals) is, of course, varied and complex, but its link to both the animal
rights movement and to the accelerating environmental crisis of our times
is undeniable. The former, a centuries-­old discourse whose current and ex-
tremely forceful phase was launched by the publication, in 1975, of Peter
Singer’s Animal Liberation, has reached deep into both social and legal prac-
tice, transforming the fields of scientific animal experimentation and animal
farming. Numerous horrifying exposés of the latter have resulted not only

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2 a n ima l a c ts

in major changes in the way so-­called food animals are raised and killed but
also in a growing army of vegetarians, silently performing a daily refusal of
meat culture. While no one working on behalf of animals feels the end of
animal exploitation is near, many of us have come to hope that it is possible.
In recent decades, attention to the plight of the other animals has come
from a source that tends to be more compelling for most people than con-
cern about animal suffering: human self-­preservation. The increasing rav-
ages of climate change have registered most dramatically on certain animal
species, including, for example, one of the most beloved of the “charismatic
mega-­fauna” (a phrase from zoo jargon) who are responsible for bringing
in the big Sunday crowds: the polar bear. As the forlorn gazes of these and
other “poster animals” of climate-­change-­extinction peer at us from Time
magazine covers and Times Square billboards, we begin to acknowledge
what we’ve always known and also carefully “not-­known”:3 their lives are
contingent, exactly as ours are, on the delicate ecology of the planet we share
with them. Now, we have to be concerned about the other animals not only
for their sakes but also for ours.4
As ecological thought itself moves into a sophisticated new phase, es-
chewing the conceptually crippling binaries—­especially the one that so
disastrously divided “nature” from “culture,” making the one into a distant
spectacle or recreational escape and the latter into a thing of pure, uncon-
strained artifice—­the cultural conception of species is being transformed
as well.5 Increasingly, it is the continuities and connections between species
that are emphasized rather than the differences. At the same time, the crude
dualism that put the human species on one side and all others—­the mil-
lions upon millions of others—­on another side, separated by a Great Wall
of human exceptionalism, is breaking down. The multitudes of other species
that we have so lazily and offensively corralled into one single word—­” The
animal! What a word!” as Jacques Derrida famously exclaimed6—­are now
roaming across the vast territories of sameness and difference that make
each one unique while each one is also multiply enmeshed in the web of all
planetary life.
Be it in the work of animal rights, in the texts of animal studies, in the
myriad animal practices found in every human culture, or in the vast field
of animal representation, “animal acts” of all kinds are changing us, are
changing our times, and will change the future of our species. The perfor-
mances and commentaries in this book invoke all these realms while also
contributing to them. They reveal the shaping force of animal discourse in
every significant cultural category: gender, class, race, nation, age, profes-
sion, sexual orientation, marital status, and, of course, species. Their scope

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 i n t r od u ct i on 3

and extension tempt me to resort to one of the characteristic methodologies

of traditional natural history: the taxonomy. I am tempted, for example, to
identify the many ways that class mediates the human relationship to ani-
mals, ranging from the upper-­class traditions of equestrianism discussed
in Kim Marra’s piece to the desperate survival tactics employed by Sawong,
the mahout who teaches Deke Weaver to ride an elephant in Thailand. I’m
tempted to classify the many ways human gender and sexuality are policed
through animal practices, ranging from the way Marra’s mother struggles
to get her “out of the barn and into a dress,” to the biblical animals whom
Jess Dobkin’s unicorn will gloriously challenge: “You know this part: They
pair up. Check, check. Two, two. Two, two. Ladies and Gentlemen, dogs and
frogs, step right up. They comply. They obey.”
These taxonomic temptations could launch a thousand college papers
or journal articles. But it quickly becomes evident that it is not only the
standard sociological categories that are being reshaped and inundated with
animal effects here but other, more surprising ones as well, mocking the
taxonomic impulse with their sheer strangeness. For example, is my origi-
nally serious schema going to survive intact if I include décor as one of the
categories remade by animal acts? Yet how could I ignore it? In fact, how
could I not give it pride of place, when I read that Joseph Keckler’s cat lady is
“the Dr. Moreau of interior decorating”? Or when I read this: in order to ac-
commodate their growing family of dogs, Holly Hughes’s lover suggests they
buy a sectional sofa, a moment at which, reports Hughes, “A part of me dies.”
Clothing is a close second in frivolity to home decor, and it also turns out
to be an unexpectedly busy arena for animal input. But perhaps we shouldn’t
be surprised that animals—­whom we have long believed to differ from us in
their inability to be naked and hence to feel shame—­should make us think
about how much we signify ourselves through our costumes and adorn-
ments. No dog would ever need to wear a t-­shirt like the one Hughes finds
herself in, that says “This is what a feminist looks like”; yet the chains that Jojo
the elephant, in Weaver’s piece, must not only wear but also carry to his cap-
tors might have something in common with those outfits worn by women at
agility trials, the ones that say, according to Hughes, “I just give up!”
If the range, variety, and strangeness of animal effects causes the taxono-
mizing impulse to shrivel and die, the task of selecting works for this col-
lection proved equally resistant to system and method. The usual categories
for guaranteeing diversity and inclusion—­gender, race, ethnicity, nation—­
quickly proved to be irrelevant. A briefly indulged fantasy of selection by
species soon appeared equally nonsensical. We decided simply to include
pieces we loved and admired for the freshness they brought to the animal

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4 a n ima l a c ts

subject (pun intended). Limitations of place made us leave out many works
that fit that description and to excerpt others. We would have loved to in-
clude more than one work by some of our artists, but in the end we limited
that impulse to the one exception of Deke Weaver, whose lifelong project,
The Unreliable Bestiary, seemed—­in its focus, dedication, and methodol-
ogy—­to warrant representation by more than one piece.
The process of pairing the performance scripts with scholars to comment
on them was guided by a desire to engage a variety of important voices from
the fields of animal studies and performance studies. Our request to the
scholars was for responses to the scripts rather than introductions to them,
with the assurance that we were open to whatever approach—­theoretical,
analytical, personal, historical, and so on—­they felt would work best for
them in the unfortunately short space we had available. Our wish was to cre-
ate as open and generative an arena as we possibly could for a conversation
that we felt was long overdue, among the fields of performance, performance
studies, and animal studies, in a way that would be pedagogically useful as
well as theoretically interesting. Both these goals were challenged by the dif-
ficult fact (so familiar to scholars and teachers of theatre and performance)
that we were encountering these words on the page—­as silent, linear, one-­
dimensional text—­rather than in the eventful three-­dimensional space of
performance for which they are intended. Some of the commentators had
the opportunity to see a performance of the piece they were writing on; most
didn’t. They did what we urge our students to do: to read for performance,
to extrapolate live effects from textual clues, to see and hear the piece in the
mind’s eye and ear. Readers of the book—­and the students and teachers who
we hope will use it to study this new disciplinary intersection—­will have
to do the same, but they will also have some help from the video excerpts
of most of the performances on the University of Michigan Press’s website:
http://www.press.umich.edu/p/animal-acts. The taste of live performance
these excerpts provide will, we are confident, combine with the close reading
that printed scripts make possible, and with the insights of our commenta-
tors, to offer a fertile meeting ground for the fields of animal studies and
performance studies.
The many shifts recorded in the pages that follow are bookended by two
statements that express a pair of fundamental principles of interspecies per-
formance. In the book’s first script, Holly Hughes begins her performance
by declaring that it’s really about dogs: for her, animals are not a metaphor.
In the book’s last script, Rachel Rosenthal ends her performance by tell-
ing us that all the animals who participated in the performance of The Oth-
ers were adopted. Thus the first article of faith of interspecies performance

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 i n t r od u ct i on 5

is that we are trying hard to talk about actual animals now, even when (as
very often, including very often in the works that follow) we cannot help but
also see them as symbols for our ideas and metaphors for human dramas.
One sure way of determining that a piece belongs to the category we are
defining here—­interspecies performance, the new kind of “animal act”—­is
that, whatever else animals may come to mean in the piece (and they will
undoubtedly mean many things), we will be reminded—­or we will want to
remind ourselves—­of their real existence, their actual being as members of
a biological species with a specific morphology, geography, and history. And
this will be so, I want to assert paradoxically, even when the animal being
discussed belongs to an imaginary species, like the unicorn in Jess Dobkin’s
piece, whose difference proves to be a sharp new lens, as Jill Dolan shows, for
gaging the baneful effect of dualistic thinking on all species.
The geographies of most animals today are vastly diasporic, their his-
tories surprisingly intertwined with those of humans; charting these dis-
persals and tracing these stories are a major interest of interspecies art-
ists. A primary mode of interspecies performance, then, is literalization, a
steady focus on—­or regular return to—­the animal or animals around whom
the performance revolves. Notwithstanding sporadic—­or even regular—­
manifestations of those flights of symbolism and those tides of anthropo-
morphism that have long characterized animal discourse—­before Aesop
and since—­the animal acts being forged today are committed to never for-
getting the animal and to always asking: “Where are the real animals in all
this?” This is no easy task, because the realities of animals’ lives have for so
long been submerged in the ugly feelings that attend cruelty to others, mak-
ing them hard to see clearly. As Rosenthal says, “The sewers of the human
psyche are clogged with the corpses of children, animals, women, animals,
slaves, animals, prisoners, animals, animals, animals . . .” Animals are and
have always been powerful metaphors; they have been not only “good to
think with,” as Claude Levi-­Strauss famously said, but even better to imag-
ine with, to make poetic sense of our lives with. John Berger writes that just
as “the first subject matter for painting was animal” and that probably “the
first paint was animal blood, it is not unreasonable to support that the first
metaphor was animal.”7 The reason for this powerful metaphoricity is, how-
ever, rooted in the specifics of animal lives: in their shapes, colors, patterns,
movements, sounds, behaviors, habits, and habitats. The animal acts of our
changing times are interested in these specifics as much as in the vital hu-
man meanings they produce.
This is probably the place to make a crucial distinction between the kind
of interspecies performance presented in this collection and the kind many

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6 a n ima l a c ts

people think of when they hear that word: namely, performances that in-
volve actual animals doing things alongside human performers. The circus
is the classic site of that kind of interspecies performance, and its history and
stories are endlessly fascinating to the artists and scholars in this book. On
occasion, that kind of interspecies performance has spilled out of circus and
into theatre, performance art, and dance. When it has, it has brought with
it many of the questions that arise in the study of circus, about the ethics of
training, captivity, and the commercial use of animals. Those questions are
often intensified around the category of art practice that Meiling Cheng has
called “animalworks” and defined as “performances and installations that
use animals as either materials or performers.”8 I have long argued that the
figure of the animal requires a more capacious concept and have proposed
the term “zooësis” to refer to the vast field of cultural animal discourse and
representation. The neologism is inspired partly by Platonic “poïesis” and
Aristotelian “mimesis,” but it also owes a debt to early feminist theorist Alice
Jardine’s concept of “gynesis,” which she defined as “the putting into dis-
course of ‘woman’ as [. . .] intrinsic to the condition of modernity; indeed,
the valorization of the feminine, woman, and her obligatory, that is, his-
torical connotations, as somehow intrinsic to new and necessary modes of
thinking, writing, speaking.”9 Obviously, I want this term, zooësis, to mark
the ways the animal is put into discourse, but I also share Jardine’s progres-
sive hope that it will contribute to the valorization of animals and teach us
that they are “intrinsic to new and necessary modes of thinking, writing,
speaking.”
The performances in this book, with one notable exception, do not bring
real, living, nonhuman animals onstage. Rather, they are records of and
reflections on the relationships—­real and imagined—­between human and
nonhuman animals. Their claim to the adjective “interspecies” derives from
their keen interest in the lives and meanings of the other animals. It derives
too from their commitment to letting the experience of those lives mold and
deepen and change the ways we understand our own—­human-­animal—­
lives.
The one work here that includes actual living animals is the last one in
the book, placed there—­without accompanying commentary10—­because it
seems to offer a multifaceted coda to the “argument” of this book, which is,
in short, that animal acts can change the times. Rosenthal was far ahead of
her time in knowing this, and The Others invoked many of the topics and
questions and discourses that animate contemporary animal studies. It also
managed to do so without raising any of the ethical questions that surround
trained animal performers11 (simply because it used domesticated animals

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 i n t r od u ct i on 7

rather than trained animal performers). At the same time, it adumbrated

a key principle of interspecies performance by dedicating itself to actual
change.
Thus the second article of faith of interspecies performance is that, in ad-
dition to talking about real animals, we act on behalf of those animals. The
two meanings of the verb “to act”—­”to represent mimetically” and “to do”—­
afford enormous ethical and political potential to interspecies performance
(as they do to other activist performance). In the pieces that follow, the hu-
man artists who play the roles of other animals, or who talk about their
interactions with other animals, do so with the consciousness that when
animals are used by humans to make meaning—­be it in art, philosophy,
or everyday life—­that discursive use of them inevitably shapes and impacts
the real lives of the actual animals in question. As Cary Wolfe brilliantly
puts it in an early classic of animal studies, “even though the discourse of
animality and species difference may theoretically be applied to an other of
whatever type, the consequences of that discourse, in institutional terms, fall
overwhelmingly on nonhuman animals, in our taken-­for granted practices
of using and exploiting them.”12 Whatever is said or implied by cultural per-
formances about the other animals will inevitably—­however circuitously—­
affect the way those animals are treated by humans out in the real world.
Few performances will have as immediate an effect as The Others did—­each
performance producing a new interspecies family!—­but the animal acts of
today unfold within an ethical awareness that deepens and complicates the
experiences they invite us to share in. Thus even though all the performances
that follow—­except The Others—­do not bring live animals on stage,13 many
of them allude to other performances that did involve live animals (Hughes’s
adventures in agility trials, for instance, or Marra’s horse-­riding), suggesting
that animal presence—­in performance as in cultural life—­is a continuum
rather than an absolute. The relative distance of that presence in the scripts
that follow is not intended in any way to signal any programmatic opposi-
tion, on our part, to performing (with) live animals. Rather, that distance is a
reflection of the current (and, indeed, traditional) conjuncture of animality
with theatricality, an effect of various characteristics of this genre that are
not shared by other performance genres (like dance) and other art forms
(like sculpture, film, and photography) but that do not therefore shut down
the genre’s interest in animals or limit its potential for making valuable con-
tributions to the current reimagining of animals and of the human-­animal
relationship.
A hallmark of interspecies performance today is something I would call
“epistemological crisis.” Animal acts bring us face to face with our assump-

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8 a n ima l a c ts

tions about what we know and how we know it. They loosen the tightly
bound categories into which we’ve packed our knowledge about the other
animals—­separately packaged for ease of transportation and convenient
stowing—­and they reorder the hierarchies about what counts as relevant
fact and reliable truth.
The great gift that the other animals have always offered to the human
species is the gift of their radical otherness, their ultimate unknowability.
They have always faced us, as John Berger wrote in his classic essay “Why
Look at Animals?,” across “a narrow abyss of non-­comprehension.”14 Since
the early modern era if not before, their enigma is a gift we have preferred to
reject, choosing instead to launch at animals the full force of Enlightenment
inquiry—­in the form of collections, dissections, taxonomies, illustrations,
definitions, classifications, natural history museums, zoos. The “scientific
facts” about animals now commingle promiscuously with mythological
remnants, old wives’ tales, superstitions, rumors, saws, and Internet hoaxes.
Do elephants really never forget (as Weaver’s elephant asserts)? Are bees
really vengeful serial stingers (as Kestutis Nakas’s piece fantasizes)? And
on what ass does the cockroach—­Carmelita Tropicana’s cockroach or any
other—­sit?
As several of the commentators in this volume point out, animals are the
privileged site of both human knowledge and human gullibility. And as all
the performance pieces demonstrate, humans’ interactions with animals are
mediated by slews of misinformation, prejudice, and ignorance. That’s one
reason that animals make such good metaphors for immigrants: we relate to
ethnic and national others, as we do to animals, as much on the basis of what
we don’t know about them as what we do. No wonder, then, that Carmelita
Tropicana’s cockroach adopts Manu Chao’s “Clandestino” to sing of her own
experience. At the same time, as the speaker’s neighbors in Nakas’s “No Bees
for Bridgeport” make clear, the cultural differences that divide humans from
each other are just as dangerous to animals, threatening their very existence.
Interspecies performance wades deep into the epistemological morass to
which we humans have exiled the other animals. In doing so it recognizes
both the cultural variety and the historical longevity of animal meaning.
Animals mean all sorts of contradictory things to different people. In the
Power Pointbased regimes of contemporary information, the monkey is (as
Weaver slyly shows) both “almost entirely arboreal, the loudest animal in the
New World,” and “an incarnation of Shiva, . . . a magic monkey who could
make himself smaller than a mouse lemur and thousands of times larger and
stronger than the biggest gorilla.” In the ecologically correct present, as we
learn in Nakas’s piece, a “beekeeping hobby craze is sweeping the country.

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 i n t r od u ct i on 9

Michelle Obama has even installed a hive in back of the White House and
tends to it with her children and secret service detail”; yet Nakas’s working-­
class emigrant neighbors shout in unison: “NO BEES FOR BRIDGEPORT!”
So varied and contradictory are human accounts of animals that any sur-
vey of them, including as informal a one as the works here represent, reveals
that the real meaning of animals is that they always escape the systems of
meaning we construct for them. Their infinite variety and mystery are such
that the best taxonomy remains the one that inspired Michel Foucault’s sem-
inal critique of the Enlightenment:

This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter
that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my
thought—­our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and
our geography—­breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes
with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing
things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with col-
lapse our age-­old distinction between the Same and the Other. This pas-
sage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written that
“animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed,
(c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h)
included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k)
drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just
broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies.” In
the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great
leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic
charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the
stark impossibility of thinking that.15

What Foucault calls the “wonderment” of this taxonomy is exactly the re-
sponse that the interspecies performances in this book strive toward: many
moments of astonishment and wonder, leading to a hope-­filled embrace of
the impossible.
Ironically, the way out of the epistemological crisis of interspecies per-
formance is often through entrance into specialized knowledges and arcane
mysteries. “Beekeepers,” Nakas tells us, “good ones, have a special kind of
knowledge. A sense of ease that allows us to draw near the hive without
arousing fear or anger. It might be a gift.” At the opposite pragmatic ex-
treme, Kim Marra remarks that although “riding is at the center of what
you do with the horse, [. . .] it occupies a relatively small portion of the time
spent on a daily basis. You also must feed and groom the horse, clean all the

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10 a n ima l a c ts

tack, learn how each piece of equipment works and needs to fit, muck the
stall, keep the barn clean, monitor the pasture for hazards, hold your horse
for the vet and blacksmith.” Sometimes, animal knowledge must proceed
by constructing whole new disciplines—­like Marra’s hippology, or “horse
science.” At other times it proceeds by deconstructing sense itself, as when
Keckler’s mother, otherwise a “militant grammarian,” repeats the baby-­talk
words “Cubs don’t do ‘rithmatic! No. Him don’t do no ‘rithmatic” over and
over again, until, as Keckler says, “As Warhol dissolved the aura of celebrity
through his serial representation of famous faces, as the Marquis de Sade
used his characters’ repetition of criminal and perverse acts to purge the acts
of their meaning, so my mother, through repetition, flushed all the logic out
of the fact that a cat can’t do math.”
Animals show us how much we still need to know, not only about them
but also about ourselves. At the same time, they show us how very hard
it is going to be to attain that knowledge, especially if we cling to our old
habits of inquiry, our old reliance on “ocular proof ” and disembodied ideas.
Much of the new knowledge gained through animal acts comes from go-
ing way past the limits of logic and book learning, and accepting instruc-
tion, instead, from the life of bodies. This is, of course, why performance
offers more to animal knowledge than any other cultural form: its reliance
on physicality, materiality, and embodiment makes it especially useful for
venturing into areas where language is absent. For example, Weaver finds
out that there “are a couple of ways to get on and off an elephant,” and all of
them involve novel uses of human and animal body parts. If you follow your
mahout’s instructions, even the ones that make no sense, and if the elephant

doesn’t wrap its trunk around your torso and tear you in half, well, here’s
what happens: you [. . .] put your hands over your head. With your right
hand you grab the top of his right ear. You put your left hand on the gray-­
wrinkly wall and grab a handful of elephant skin (it’s like heavy padded
canvas). The elephant lifts his right foot. You put your foot on the raised
right knee. One! Two! Three! HUP! You push down with your right leg,
your elephant boosts you up, you pull on his right ear and his right shoul-
der and swing your left leg up and over his neck.

Sometimes, the connection between animal knowledge and the human body
is simple and direct: “The key to good riding is a good seat,” Marra tells us.
At other times, as Hughes reminds us, learning about animals requires that
“first you have to struggle into your body.”
Animal acts convey new knowledges through new bodily experiences in
space and time. They invite us to explore new habitats, where we might prac-

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 i n t r od u ct i on 11

tice more imaginative and ethical ways of life. They encourage us to develop
new habits of heart and mind so that we can return again, however sporadi-
cally, to live in that long-­ago poem that Hughes talks about, in which “we
rhymed with all the other animals.”
This book is after other kinds of rhyming as well: between theory and
practice, performance and analysis, animal acts and animal studies, animal
acts and performance studies. We come to animals, as Steve Baker has said,
“as a reminder of the limits of human understanding, and also of the value
of working at those limits.”16 If one creative solution to the epistemological
crisis that animals precipitate is embodiment, another is dialogue, especially
dialogue across traditional boundaries of knowledge. We are immensely
grateful to all the artists and scholars who collaborated with each other and
with us on creating the dialogue-­performance that is this book.

N ot es

1. Una Chaudhuri, “Animal Acts for Changing Times,” American Theatre (Oct.
2004).
2. Book series on animal studies are being published by the University of Chicago
Press, Columbia University Press, Rodopi Press, Brill, Penn State Press, the Johns
Hopkins University Press, and Reaktion Books. Minding Animals International is
a major multidisciplinary conference, held on different continents every two years.
Journals in animal studies include Society and Animals, the Journal for Critical Ani-
mal Studies, Antennae: The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture, Humanimalia: A Jour-
nal of Human-­Animal Interface Studies, and the Animal Studies Journal (Australia).
The following journals have recently had special issues devoted to animal studies:
TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies 51, no. 1 (Spring 2007), PMLA 124, no. 2
(Mar. 2009); Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 27, no. 3 (Summer 2012).
3. In J. M. Coetzee’s contemporary classic of animal studies The Lives of the Ani-
mals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), his protagonist Elizabeth Costel-
lo famously (or notoriously) compares the modern denial of animal practices to the
denial of ordinary Germans in Nazi Germany, characterizing both as a “willed igno-
rance,” a nonknowing “in that special sense” (20–­21).
4. For a discussion of recent performances on this theme, see Una Chaudhuri,
“The Silence of the Polar Bears: Performing (Climate) Change in the Theatre of Spe-
cies,” in Wendy Arons and Theresa May, eds., Readings in Performance and Ecology
(Palgrave, 2012), 45–­58.
5. For a brief discussion of how changing accounts of evolution in biology are
affecting ecological thought and what these changes offer to the fields of ecocriticism
and animal studies, see Timothy Morton, “Guest Column: Queer Ecology” PMLA
125, no. 2 (Mar. 2010): 273–­82.
6. Jacques Derrida, The Animal That Therefore I Am, ed. Marie-­Louise Mallet,
trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 23.
7. John Berger, “Why Look at Animals?” in About Looking. New York, Pantheon,
1980. 3-­28

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12 a n ima l a c ts

8. Meiling Cheng, “Animal Works in China,” in TDR: The Journal of Performance

Studies, special issue, Animals and Performance, guest ed. Una Chaudhuri, 51, no. 1
(Spring 2007) 63–­91.
9. Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1985), 25
10. I have, however, written at length about this work elsewhere, in terms that
explain why I regard it as seminal and paradigmatic: “In formal terms as well as in
substance and subject, The Others is encyclopedic. Every medium and every channel
of performance, every element of the theatrical apparatus is pressed into service to
deliver a mountain of information and an ocean of feeling on the subject of animals.
Using dialogue, monologue, song, music, dance, movement, slides, voice-­overs, vid-
eo, physical movement, stage architecture, technological devices and—­yes—­forty-­
two live animals, Rosenthal embarks upon an epic missionary performance on be-
half of animals. The range of discourses she manages to incorporate makes the work
a solid introduction to the major tenets of the animal rights movement.” See Una
Chaudhuri, “Animal Rites: Performing Beyond the Human,” in Joseph Roach and
Janelle Reinelt, eds., Critical Theory and Performance, rev. ed. (Ann Arbor: Univer-
sity of Michigan Press, 2007). 506-­520
11. For a discussion of this issue, see Una Chaudhuri, “Animals in the Perform-
ing Arts.” in The Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare (Westport, CT.,
Greenwood Publishing Group, 2010).
12. Cary Wolfe, “Introduction,” in Cary Wolfe, ed., Zoontologies: The Question of
the Animal (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xx.
13. Dead animals are, of course, always present on every stage and in every scene
of human life, in the form of the many corporeal “by-­products” that saturate contem-
porary material lives. See, for example, a recent article in the Daily Beast: “Animal
Products. http://www.thedailybeast.com/galleries/2010/05/22/animal-­products.
html#slide1. Accessed July 2012.
14. Berger, About Looking, 5. New York, Pantheon, 1980. 3-­28.
15. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Senses.
New York, Vintage, 1994.
16. Steve Baker, The Postmodern Animal (London: Reaktion Books, 2000), 16.

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